A Time of Gifts (31 page)

On the first day of the battle of Crete, the memory of these Vienna weeks leapt back to my mind.

Shortly after the first wave of German parachutists had dropped, a captured enemy document was brought to our battle H.Q. in the rocks outside Herakleion, where I was a junior officer. The paper contained the entire enemy order of battle, and, as I was thought to know German, it was handed to me: the spearhead of the attack, it disclosed, was under the command of a Captain von der Heydte: his battalion had been dropped near Galata, at the other end of the island, between Canea and Maleme aerodrome: close to where I had been stationed until a few days before. A German officer who was taken prisoner soon after cleared up any doubt. It was Einer, beyond question: he had transferred from the cavalry to a parachute unit some time before.

The noise and the fighting died down at sunset. The short May night was illuminated by destroyed planes burning fitfully among the olive-trees and during these hours of respite, I couldn't stop thinking of this strange coincidence. Chaos broke out again at dawn; and, all through the mortal blind-man's-buff of the next eight days, I thanked my stars that we were loose, as it were, in different parts of the wood, for battles had degenerated during the last eighty-seven years. No chance now, like Cardigan and Radziwill recognizing each other from London ballrooms, of exchanging brief and ceremonious greetings through the smoke of the
Russian guns. Again and again, in those whistling and echoing ravines, where a new and unknown smell was beginning to usurp the scents of spring, my thoughts flew back to the winter of 1934 and the tunes and jokes and guessing games, the candlelight and the scent of burning pine-cones when nothing was flying through the air more solid than snowflakes.
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Surrounded by maps and atlases in the Akademie library, I discovered that, as the crow flies between Rotterdam and Constantinople, I was a little less than half-way. But no crow would have flown in the enormous loop that I had followed, and when I plotted the route and stepped it out with dividers, the total came to a great deal more than half; not that this meant much: the rest of the journey was sure to take an equally tortuous course. I knocked off the miles for the trip on the Rhine-barge and the lifts I had taken in bad weather and found that the distance I had actually slogged on my two feet was seven hundred and fifty miles. The journey had lasted sixty-two days, and when I had struck out the halts of more than one night and divided the distance by the time, the average worked out at twelve miles a day. Bearing in mind a few marches from daybreak till long after dark, but conveniently forgetting the times I had merely strolled to the next village, I was a little disappointed. I had imagined it was far more. But I was delighted with everything else. I never tired of recapitulating the journey. I had crossed three parallels of latitude and eleven meridians and moved over from the North Sea—still called ‘the German
Ocean' on old maps—to a minute-line of longitude running from the Baltic to the south-east Adriatic. Even looked at from the moon—so the terrestrial and celestial globes suggested—the distance covered would have been as discernible as the Great Wall of China.

Back among the maps, and conscious all at once of the accessibility of the Mediterranean, I was assaulted by a train of thought which for a moment set the expedition in jeopardy. It is a famous hazard. All dwellers in the Teutonic north, looking out at the winter sky, are subject to spasms of a nearly irresistable pull, when the entire Italian peninsula from Trieste to Agrigento begins to function like a lodestone. The magnetism is backed by an unseen choir, there are roulades of mandoline strings in the air; ghostly whiffs of lemon blossom beckon the victims south and across the Alpine passes. It is Goethe's Law and is ineluctable as Newton's or Boyle's. I had felt twinges of its power as I crossed the Inn between Augsburg and Munich during a snowstorm:
why not follow the river upstream to the Brenner
, soft voices had seemed to whisper,
and swoop down on Lombardy
? And, sitting as restlessly as a fifth-century Goth and gazing at the cartographic defiles that cross the atlas page to Venice, I felt it now; but not for long. Thank heavens the fit passed. Venice, after all, was on the edge of familiar territory: Italy could wait. Just in time, the windings of the Middle and the Lower Danube began to reassert their claims and the Carpathians and the Great Hungarian Plain and the Balkan ranges and all these mysterious regions which lay between the Vienna Woods and the Black Sea brought their rival magnetisms into play. Was I really about to trudge through this almost mythical territory? How would it compare to the lands I had already crossed? I would have been amazed had I known how circuitous it would be, and how much further than I had thought.

* * *

Meanwhile, there was Vienna.

I had always enjoyed museums and picture galleries, but it was
firmly established here that no stranger could let any of the city's wonders elude him—“I suppose you've seen the Harrach collection? Have you looked at Habsburg tombs in the Kapuzinerkirche yet? What about the Belvedere?”—that I was shamed into exploring Vienna with unusual thoroughness. I found a companion now and then. One, much too briefly, was a funny, extremely vague and marvellously beautiful girl who was being finished in Vienna, called Ailsa McIver. She had the sort of radiant high spirits that made everyone turn round and smile. But usually I was alone.

Few delights could compare with these wintry days: the snow outside, the bare trees outlined by the frost, the muted light, and, indoors, the rooms following each other filled with the spoils, the heirlooms and the dowries of a golden age. The galleries of the hibernating city retreated and grew smaller in the distance like vistas along dim rectangular telescopes. I had heard someone say that Vienna combined the splendour of a capital with the familiarity of a village. In the Inner City, where crooked lanes opened on gold and marble outbursts of Baroque, it was true; and, in the Kärntnerstrasse or the Graben, after I had bumped into three brand-new acquaintances within a quarter of an hour, it seemed truer still, and parts of the town suggested an even narrower focus. There were squares as small and complete and as carefully furnished as rooms. Façades of broken pediment and tiered shutter enclosed hushed rectangles of cobble; the drip of icicles eroded gaps in the frozen scallops of the fountains; the statues of archdukes or composers presided with pensive nonchalance; and all at once, as I loitered there, the silence would fly in pieces when the initial clang from a tower routed a hundred pigeons crowding a Palladian cornice and scattered avalanches of snow and filled the geometric sky with wings. Palace succeeded palace, casemented arches sailed across the streets, pillars lifted their statues; ice-fettered in their pools, tritons floundered beneath a cloudy heaven and ribbed cupolas expanded by the score. The greatest of these, the dome of the Karlskirche, floated with a balloon's lightness in an enclosing hemisphere of snow and the friezes that spiralled the shafts of the
two statue-crowned guardian columns—free-standing and as heavily wrought as Trajan's—gained an added impromptu spin when they vanished half-way up in a gyre of flakes.

A hint of touchy Counter-Reformation aggression accompanies some ecclesiastical Baroque. There is a dash of it here and there in Vienna, and St. Stephen's—steep and streamlined and Gothic—springs up unchallenged in the heart of it as though the balance needed redress. Bristling with finials and unloosing its gargoyles, the Cathedral lifts a solitary and warning steeple which dominates every dome and cupola and bell-tower in the city. (Styles of architecture become an obsession in this town. They played a great part in the circle I had strayed into. In a game of analogies, someone had suggested a murex shell, with its spines and its centrifugal asymmetry and its flaky and crusted surfaces, as the epitome of Rococo. Likewise, the symmetrical convolutions and the balancing arabesques of Baroque could be symbolized by a violin. A crosier hit off the brackeny helix and the exfoliation of Flamboyant; and Gothic could be a mitre—in the case of a cathedral, a whole Council of them piled like a card house until they vanished tapering in the clerestory shadows where void and solid change places and turn to stone.) In the rank of fiacres outside the south door of St. Stephen's, cabbies in bowlers conversed in the Vienna dialect while they straightened the blankets on their horses' quarters and gave them their feed in buckets. Some of these were as heavily whiskered as their masters. They steamed and fidgeted between the shafts, scattering their oats over the caked snow and the cobbles and sending an agreeable stable-yard whiff across the fumes of the hot coffee and the fresh cakes in the pastrycooks' shops. Joining in my memory with the cold edge of the frost, the combination of these scents conjure up the city in a second.

* * *

‘When the right vertuous E.W. and I were at the Emperour's court togither, wee gave our selves to learne horsemanship of Ion Pietro
Pugliano.' It was the opening sentence of Sir Philip Sidney's
Defense of Poesie
; he was talking of Vienna in the winter of his twentieth year—1574—when he and Edward Wotton were on some unexacting mission from Elizabeth to Maximilian II: Their duties left them plenty of free hours for the riding school and for listening to the fertile Italian wit of their friend and instructor. ‘He said...horsemen were the noblest of soldiers...they were the maisters of war, and ornaments of peace, speedie goers, and strong abiders, triumphers both in Camps and Courts: nay, to so unbleeved a point he proceeded, as that no earthly thing bred such wonder to a Prince, as to be a good horseman. Skill of government were but a Pedanteria, in comparison; then would he adde several praises, by telling what a peerless beast the horse was, the only serviceable Courtier without flattery, the beast of most bewtie, faithfulnesse, courage, and such more, that if I had not beene a peece of a Logician before I came to him, I think he would have perswaded mee to have wished my selfe a horse.' Basset Parry-Jones had read the passage aloud to show that Vienna had always been a temple for the cult of horsemanship. It had been an imported Italian skill in Renaissance times, like fencing, sonnet-writing, building loggias and the technique of foreshortening; but in later centuries the passion rioted like a native growth all over the Empire and there were still plenty of Austrians with a horsy gait and bearing—and of Hungarians, even more, as I was to learn during the coming months—who had a soft spot for the British Isles on purely equestrian grounds. There, they felt, lay the central shrine: not of dressage and haute école, but of speed and huge fences and broken necks, and their eyes would cloud over at the memory of antediluvian seasons in the shires. Hard-bitten centaurs from both parts of the Dual Monarchy recalled with just pride how their great-uncle Kinsky had won the Grand National on Zoedone in 1883. Among these earnest experts omniscience in horse-genealogy ran neck and neck with mastery of the Almanach of Gotha, and they fondly cherished the many equine links between the two countries. Why, an Austrian affirmed, three
Turkish mares, seized from the rout of the Turkish cavalry at the relief of Vienna, had been sent to England in 1684, several years before any of the famous founding sires of English bloodstock had set a hoof in the kingdom. Where was the Godolphin Barb then, or the Byerly Turk, and where the Darley Arabian? That was nothing, a grizzled Hungarian would protest, his brows beetling: what about the Lister Turk, the stallion the Duke of Berwick had captured from the Ottomans at the siege of Buda a couple of years later, and taken back to James II's stables?

It was our visit to the Spanish Riding School that had given rise to all this. (The beautiful wing of the Hofburg was built a century and a half later than the oval where Sidney and Wotton must have practised, but Maximilian's stables were up already; they are resonant still with whinnying and munching.) We had lolled over the balcony like Romans at the games while virtuosi in glistening jackboots and brown frock-coats—the scarlet was kept for Sundays—evolved beneath us. They wore their bicornes sideways like Napoleon and sat erect and still as tin horsemen in the saddles of their Lipizzaner greys. These horses were traditionally derived from the noblest Spanish or Neapolitan strains—which probably means they were Arabs, like the godlike Barbs and Arabians and Turks we were talking about—and they used to be bred at Lipizza, in the Slovenian hills and oak-woods to the north-east of Fiume.
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Slightly darker in hue when young, they get paler as they grow and the juvenile dappling fades from their quarters like freckles from children's cheeks. Fully grown, they are snow white creatures of great beauty, strong, elegant, compact and mettlesome, wide-eyed under their taciturn riders and with manes and tails as sleekly combed and as rippling as the tresses of Rhine-maidens.

They moved with grace and precision about the glaucous concavity
of the school: caracoling across the raked and muffling tan, rhythmically changing step, passaging, advancing as though double-jointed, flicking out their forelegs as straight as match-sticks, slewing over the manège in side-stepped hesitation waltzes, pawing the air as they backed slowly on their haunches and taking to the air at last like Pegasus and seeming to remain there for long moments of suspension and stasis. Except when a recondite feat evoked a crackle of applause, the sequence unfolded in a stilly hush. Learned writers derive the style from the classical school of the seventeenth century and, in particular, from the principles elaborated in the Duke of Newcastle's great work. He wrote and published it during the Commonwealth when he was a Royalist general in exile at Antwerp. Anyone turning over the plates in the splendid folio, especially when he gazes on engravings of the author himself in action, will notice the kinship at once. (The dales and the queer rusticated façade of Bolsover sweep across the background and the solitary cavalier, periwigged, ribanded and plumed and as cool as a cucumber, is levitated in patrician aloofness astride a mount with its mane tied in neat bows and curvetting in mid-air with the resilience of a dolphin. Watching his lavoltas and corantos, expert hidalgos from Castille with rowels the size of Michaelmas daisies would make the sign of the cross and cry “Miraculo!”) These later Viennese evolutions were as precise and as complex and as unhastening as the Spanish etiquette which, so the survivors say, constricted the Habsburg court till the end. Poker-faces froze the riders' features into masks which were symbolic of the arcane and introvert madness which pervades all haute école; and a spell-bound aura, as of four-footed zombies, clothed their neurotic and ravishing steeds. A vision of haunting wonder.